Tokens Per Watt: Why Your Context Window Is a Power Decision
Two power walls, twenty-two years apart
In May 2004, Intel cancelled Tejas and Jayhawk. The chips worked on paper. They just couldn't be cooled. Dennard scaling (the rule that let you shrink transistors, drop voltage, and keep total chip power flat) had stopped holding, leakage current was climbing exponentially, and power density was heading past what air cooling could handle. Clock frequency, the number the entire industry had been marketing on for two decades, stopped going up.
Here's June 2026. Gartner forecasts global data center electricity consumption at 565 TWh this year, up from 447 TWh in 2025, with power demand hitting 132 GW and projected to reach 290 GW by 2030. AI-optimized servers account for 31% of data center power consumption in 2026 and will pass conventional servers in 2027. The quote from Gartner's Linglan Wang is the one to hold onto: AI capacity is now constrained by power...
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